BEFORE: Back from two semi-late nights working at the movie theater, and I'm back on Netflix tonight with a film that was super-trending there about two months ago, which was about when I put together my last chain for the year, the one that's going to get me from Halloween to Christmas. So naturally it made sense at the time to include this one, but I haven't heard much about it lately, so the heat for it may have cooled a little bit. Anyway it's time to find out why it was trending in the first place - or maybe it was just new to Netflix.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. carries over from "The High Note".
THE PLOT: A smart, likeable 17-year-old film student from Harlem sees his world turned upside down when he's charged with a murder. We follow his dramatic journey through a complex legal battle.
AFTER: This is a cagey one, naturally with any court-based drama you're not going to know the verdict until the very end, but this film jumps around in time so much that the audience doesn't even know if the lead character is guilty or innocent until some time after THAT. I should hate this one for excessive time-jumping, this non-linear narrative thing really gets on my nerves if I see it in more than one film in a week. But since this is also a film about a film student, whose teacher tells him that every film is a complex series of choices, which shot to cut to next, how long that shot's going to be, and all of those choices influence the sensory experience, the mood of the film, and the experience of that other reality - it's almost apologetic in tone here, explaining that this film is just a series of shots, short segments that have been curated to produce a specific overall conclusion, really, that's just the language of film.
The film teacher also shows "Rashomon" to his class, and we therefore learn that the truth can change from person to person, depending on what they saw, or what they believed they saw, or what they ate for breakfast that day. That's film, but it's also justice, which hangs on both reliable and unreliable witnesses, attorneys that may be bending the truth or not allowing certain evidence into court, or filing motions to supress, etc. and then of course there's the jury, and everything could depend on who and what those 12 people believe. I should hate that "Rashomon" is used to drive this point home, because it feels like a cheat, a dirty filmmaking trick. What is an event witnessed by a few, describe to many but a complex, changing thing that can be re-interpreted and therefore, doesn't reality greatly depend on one's point of view?
Then again - this teen accused of murder is a film student, and take it from me, you just can't trust them. I used to be one myself, only I wasn't very good at it - I didn't pull a diva director move when my errant crew member never showed up for my shoots, I just went ahead and made the films by myself. I COULD have gotten that guy in trouble for not showing up, if I'd snitched to the instructor maybe he would have failed that class, not received his degree from NYU and then the world would have been spared a few terrible Hollywood movies ("The Family Man", "Rush Hour 3" and "X-Men: The Last Stand") - only I didn't do that, as always I just didn't want to make any trouble, I just wanted to put my head down and get my work done - so clearly I didn't have the stones to be a big-time director.
Anyway, this kid, Steve Harmon, makes a few friends in his Harlem neighborhood, and these guys are bad news - worse than film students, even. Steve stands accused of acting as a lookout for a robbery gone bad, which leads to a murder charge. It's possibly a huge NITPICK POINT here, because from my extensive legal experience watching episodes of "Law & Order", wouldn't it make more sense to charge Steve as an accessory to murder, rather than murder itself? That's probably an easier charge to make stick, with a reduced sentence most likely - but Steve maintains his evidence and works closely with his attorney to go over his testimony and act in ways that will, ideally, lead the jury to clear him of the charges.
Also on trial are James King and Richard "Bobo" Evans, and slowly, as the trial progresses, and winds its way through the past and the present, the details of the day in question slowly come to light. One witness says she saw Steve signal the other defendants, but Steve says he was just putting his arm up to shield his face from the sun. Steve's testimony claims that it was a hot day and he just went into the store to get a cold beverage - but how do we know he's telling the truth, how does anybody ever know what's going on in someone else's mind? It's a tough neighborhood, after all, and just because somebody's a film student, that doesn't mean that they AREN'T mixed up with criminals or running with a gang. People can be more than one thing, after all.
Overall I'm just thinking about how much manipulation was used here, which again stems from the deliberate withholding of information until deemed necessary, this is exacerbated by the time-jumping, non-linear nature of the film to deliberately set up the situation where we the audience can't determine the lead character's guilt or innocence. A weird sort of balancing point is achieved if you believe that the trial's verdict could go either way, and the same could be said for Steve's guilt or innocence - and those are potentially two distinct, different things. You the viewer are forced to maybe come to terms with some things in your own mind, be that based on race or class or whatever, and then you've got to be comfortable with the conclusions that you come to. I sort of see WHY of telling the story this way, but I'm still not sold on the HOW. Does that make sense?
BUT I think I see why this film was so popular earlier this year, a few months (?) back - this film premiered in at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, but I can't find any box office information, so perhaps it was never released theatrically? Then it finally got a release on Netflix in May 2021, so really, that was the first chance for most people to see it - that might explain things.
Also starring Jennifer Hudson (last seen in "Cats"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "Broken City"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Rakim "A$AP Rocky" Mayers (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Nasir "Nas" Jones (ditto), Paul Ben-Victor (last seen in "The Irishman"), John David Washington (last seen in "Tenet"), Jharrel Jerome (last seen in "Moonlight"), Dorian Missick (last seen in "Freedomland"), Willie C. Carpenter (last seen in "Ode to Joy"), Rege Lewis, Jonny Coyne (last seen in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), Lovie Simone, Liam Obergfoll, Mikey Madison (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Nyleek Moore, Roberto Lopez, Amanda Crown, Danny Henriquez (last seen in "Barry"), Teresa Avia Lim, Jeremy Dash, Joel Van Liew, Manuel Joaquin Santiago, Adriana Ducassi, Mitch Roberson, Vincent Veloso.
RATING: 5 out of 10 supervised family visits
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